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In our previous article we showed you how to create an iSCSI target on a free SAN server called OpenFiler. In this article we will show you how you can connect a Windows Seven machine to an iSCSI target. Once connected, you should be able to mount it as a local hard drive. iSCSI is the next best protocol after Fiber Channel because it offers good speeds and is not as expensive as Fiber Channel (as a matter of fact you can have free iSCSI target servers such as OpenFiler). iSCSI is a preferred choice for IT users especially those who work on virtualization platforms such as VMWare ESX or ESXi.

OpenFiler is a great open source solution for your SAN needs. It's free and does what most high end SAN solutions will provide. One of the things you can leverage OpenFiler for is to provide you with your iSCSI targets. If you are a VMWare related virtualization shop, iSCSI protocol and storage is indispensable. In this article we will show you as to how you can configure OpenFiler to provide you with iSCSI targets. When configured with iSCSI targets, you can connect to these from any Windows or even Linux Unix machines and mount the iSCSI targets such that they appear as local hard drives or volumes. OpenFiler iSCSI implementation provides a great virtual platform to test out ESX or ESXi since iSCSI is the next best thing to fiber channel and is faster than some of the other normal protocols.

In our earlier article we showed you how to configure the popular Network Area Storage Appliance called FreeNAS. The latest version of FreeNAS, version 8 is significantly different than its predecessors. In this article we will show you how you can configure CIFS so you can connect to a CIFS share from any machine using a username and password. CIFS is Common Internet File System which is also known as SMB or Server Messaging block. In our example our FreeNAS appliance is not configured with ZFS or Zero File System rather Universal File System. If you need any help on how to pre configure the appliance so that you can refer to our previous article on How to configure FreeNAS 8.

FreeNAS is a very popular platform for Network Area Storage. The latest release of FreeNAS is FreeNAS version 8, which is quite different from previous releases. There is no direct upgrade path to FreeNAS version 8 from its previous versions, the system requirements also have changed considerably. Before you take the leap to the new version, its a great idea to try installing the new FreeNAS 8 platform in a virtual machine, without risking your current data. In this step by step article we will show you how to install FreeNAS 8 on a virtual machine on a VMWare server. We are just using VMWare server as a Virtual Machine hosting platform, but the configuration steps will be similar for other virtualization platforms such as VirtualBox, Hyper-V etc.